1960s, The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement (1967)
Context: A profound judgment of today's riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, 'If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.' / The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos.
“Crime is a form of "unorganized" class struggle, and the lowest groups in the society have always committed a disproportionate number of crimes.”
Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 5, Unstable America, p. 189
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Daniel Bell 24
American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor emeritu… 1919–2011Related quotes
“To have committed every crime but that of being a father.”
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born
“A king is sometimes obliged to commit crimes; but they are the crimes of his position.”
Political Aphorisms, Moral and Philosophical Thoughts (1848)
The Meaning of the Russian Revolution (1906), a work about the 1905 Russian Revolution.
Context: Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society. Nor can this be otherwise, since always and everywhere a Government, by its very nature, must put in the place of the highest, eternal, religious law (not written in books but in the hearts of men, and binding on every one) its own unjust, man-made laws, the object of which is neither justice nor the common good of all but various considerations of home and foreign expediency.
“You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.”
“Outside of the killings, D. C. has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”
As quoted in USA Today (24 March 1989), p. 2A
1980s
“Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.”
Source: Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
Source: Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
“A crime is something someone else commits.”
Source: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Part Two, Chapter XX